Human-Computer Interaction and Cognitive Psychology in Visualization Education

A curriculum designed to educate those who design, develop, and deploy scientific visualizations and/or visualization tools needs to contain a strong component of both human-computer interaction and human cognition. The argument centers around two observations. The first is the rapidly increasing breadth of application for computer-based visualizations and the tools for creating them. The second observation is that increasingly problems addressed using visualizations involve representing abstract objects, entities or relationships for which there is no obvious direct physical analog. Both trends point towards an increased need for understanding and incorporating visualization needs of an increasingly diverse set of users. In addition the trends towards increased diversity of users and the abstractness of representations being created for their use virtually demand an increased understanding of psychological nature of visualizations and their effects.